National Post‘s Jonathan Kay has some interesting thoughts on the Derb and The Talk:
This is not ordinary racism. It is more interesting and antique than that: explicitly racialist in substance, but also ornamented with editorial grace notes and exhortations to humane acts of tokenism. One is reminded of, say, old-fashioned British types putting up their slide show from a safari in South Africa, or a charity trip to an inner-city school.
I recognize the style because Derbyshire wrote precisely the same sort of article about gays nine years ago. In a National Review piece entitled “The One and the Many”…
As with Derbyshire’s racism, his homophobia is leavened by a tortured intellectual effort to reconcile (a) his old-fashioned revulsion and fear at black and gay collective sub-cultures; with (b) the modern, liberal, earnestly felt reflex to treat each person as an individual.
What Derbyshire wrote is true, all too true, which precisely is why he has been purged. Political correctness is at war with the truth.
As noted previously, human biodiversity is real, very real:
http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/
What Derbyshire wrote was magnificently ass backwards. His entire thought train is a delightfully frank example of how social conservative thinking backs up on itself like a clogged pipe (this is without even getting into his equating predation of the young with homosexuality, is a molestor of little girls a homosexual then Derb?).
“Homosexuals are shameful and are rightfully shunned in public and prevented from having ordinary relationships. Thus they sneak into various ministries and organizations to give vent to their other non-sexual tendencies and then, when they reach a critical mass, have clandestine sexual adventures to the detriment of the organizations they inhabit.” The solution to the social cons of course is that the gays in question should be chased out of the organizations or watched and policed closely. What never occurrs to them is that if they just allowed gay people to live ordinary lives in public then there’d be little to no pressure driving homosexuals into these various organizations and no reason for clandescine sexual excapades.
Bad reasoning, Mr. North. And false, since he was just fired by your very same “social conservative” bogeymen.
” His entire thought train is a delightfully frank example of how social conservative thinking backs up on itself like a clogged pipe blahblahblah…”
Derbyshire wasn’t fired by National Review for his piece on gay people, and in fact NR published that dreadful dreck.
Doesn’t sound like National Review. Cite, pls.
I see: I thought you were referring to Mr. North’s below, which is not Derbyshire.
“Homosexuals are shameful and are rightfully shunned in public and prevented from having ordinary relationships. Thus they sneak into various ministries and organizations to give vent to their other non-sexual tendencies and then, when they reach a critical mass, have clandestine sexual adventures to the detriment of the organizations they inhabit.”
I was paraphrasing the Derb, but I think the gist of it is correct. If you think otherwise you’d need to actually take a position and assert it instead of just blahblahblahing. Do you think I’m misreading Derb in his excreable article about gays? What do you think he’s asserting? Do you think my basic assertion; if gays weren’t generally persecuted and harassed there’d be little incentive for them to colonize institutions and have clandestine sexual excapades; is incorrect? Why?
As Nob observed Tom, the Derb’s position on gays was and is generally well received in conservative circles.
As for the rest, you’ve not actually said anything other than that you don’t like it.
But those two things don’t need to be resolved. There’s no conflict. If you treat individuals and individuals, you’re not a racist. For example, many leftists hate white rural evangelical culture. That doesn’t mean that they’re racists who hate white people, because not all white people belong to the white rural evangelical subculture. Ancestry is correlated with culture, but it doesn’t determine it absolutely.
“If you treat individuals and individuals, you’re not a racist. ”
But that’s race-blindness, which is the most pernicious form of racism, because those who practice race-blindness honestly convince themselves that they aren’t racist!
But that’s a terrible analogy to the Derbyshire issue.
A better analogy would be for liberals to hate white rural evangelical culture, and to then take the very important additional step and say that you should avoid white people, because white people as a people and dangerous and unintelligent, because they are white. Which would, actually, be racist. And how you can condense that, either using “black” or “white,” into “treating individuals as individuals” is a very neat trick indeed.
If you exchange “redneck” for “white,” that would be fairly accurate.
Then as soon as rednecks become a race you’ll have a fair point.
I believe that would be “classism.”
Remember when liberals tossed around that map with the “average state IQ” and all of the red states had low IQs? That was fun. Not long ago, I was in a discussion with someone who thought we should have a fat tax on health care because that would really show those southern a-holes what’s what! He provided a map in the proposal with the various rates of obesity by state. Never mind that that a white southerner (his presumed target) is less likely to be obese than a minority nationally, it is nonetheless indicative of a great deal of cultural hostility that goes beyond individuals-as-individuals.
Granted, the above isn’t racial. But one does not have to look very hard to see a very strong cultural component in a lot of racism. I’m not actually on board with Brandon’s comment, but the degree to which “it’s different because they’re white!” does ring hollow, after a while, especially given the class issues. Not that it’s the same, but they’re not the world’s apart that a lot of people seem to believe. You’re still looking at a group of people from a wealthier and more culturally elite part of the country wondering why the people from a more distressed part of the country are so damned backwards. And often doing so with very little care.
I’ve thought for a very long time that racism is a diversion to prevent the mind-numbed masses from contemplating the extent of classism.
Absolutely. There’s nothing better to distract the people on the second-lowest rung of the latter from their own grievances than warning them to watch out for the guys on the bottom rung.
You know, I agree with this 100% – but I am stopped short at figuring out how this acts as a defense of what Derbyshire said.
This is where the right gets into trouble on these issues. It’s not enough to just say, “that was really unacceptable.” They can’t help going that one step further, to tweak the left, where they then kinda sorta try to justify it, and they come off looking like something they aren’t to folks in the middle.
I’m sorry, but who in the hell reads Derbyshire’s piece and comes away thinking that the point of it was that we need to judge “individuals as individuals?” That’s not a serious argument, that’s trying to tweak the left at the expense of a serious argument.
.I’m sorry, but who in the hell reads Derbyshire’s piece and comes away thinking that the point of it was that we need to judge “individuals as individuals?”
Jonathan Kay. I haven’t actually read the Derbyshire piece, other than what you excerpted, as I wasn’t able to access it at that time.
Hey, I was gearing up for a fight. I feel robbed, somehow. 🙂
(Someday I’ll figure out how to write my monster post, or posts, on the “Sarah Palin’s rise did not occur in a vacuum” along with my very uneven relationship with my native region.)
Will – Sorry! Let me try again:
ARE YOU KIDDING ME???!!!! That’s the kind of racist swill I would expect from you. YOU PEOPLE ARE ALL THE SAME!!!!!
🙂
Oh, I wasn’t talking about Derbyshire. I was talking about Kay’s claim that those two things need to be reconciled.
Also, it’s not clear to me what he thinks racism means, if it’s something that’s compatible with treating individuals as individuals.
I don’t know that Kay is claiming that the two things are compatible. I think he saying that he reads Derbyshire as having an inclination to try to treat individuals as individuals, but that he (Derb) also has a racist disposition (for lack of a better word – sorry, I lost my train of thought in the middle there). These two things come into conflict – thus requiring a need to try to reconcile them – because they are incompatible.
Ah. That makes much more sense, and is more in line with the BBerg I’ve come to know.
Please disregard the above comments then. Mea culpa.
There you go, de-escalating again. You really don’t get what this blogging this is all about, do you?
Yeah, Tod really ruins everybody’s fun.